


i never planned on no one like you

by CrimsonPetrichor



Series: the king of new york [1]
Category: Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Friendship, Identity Reveal, Post-Spider-Man: Homecoming, questionable management of emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-21
Updated: 2017-07-21
Packaged: 2018-12-03 19:58:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11539371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrimsonPetrichor/pseuds/CrimsonPetrichor
Summary: You would think that a person who can mentally run quadratic functions while swinging across the New York City skyline would be a little quicker on the uptake.--Peter might be the last person in Queens to realize how he feels about MJ.





	i never planned on no one like you

**Author's Note:**

> The titles of both the fic and the series come from _Newsies_ , because apparently I have a fondness for the "kid from New York who has a hero complex and hangs out on fire escapes a lot" archetype.

It happens during an Academic Decathlon meeting, somewhere between him answering a calculus question ( _“X-squared-over-two-plus-or-minus-k?”_ ) and Abe ringing in to answer a question about the First World War ( _“The Prize Regulations!”_ )  
  
It’s not a metaphorical lightning bolt or an out-of-body moment of earth-shattering realization. It’s not even a moment of non-earth-shattering realization. Peter just glances over at MJ to make sure he got the answer right and then he finds that he doesn't particularly want to look away.  
  
No, wait. That sounds creepy. Does that sound creepy?  
  
It’s- he’s not trying to be creepy. It’s just that she’s so focused, drilling the team on these questions, and in spite of the fact that she’s still pretty deadpan, there’s something behind her eyes that makes Peter think she’s kind of having fun. It probably helps that she’s found a loophole around Mr. Harrington vetoing her idea of a ‘you’re wrong’ buzzer, choosing to just make the buzzer noise herself, twice punctuated by a “You suck.” (To be fair, both times it’s been directed at Flash, who in his eagerness to ring the bell first blows two relatively easy math questions, so yeah, he does kind of suck.)  
  
She always takes the observer role before anyone else can snatch it up. Any other time that he looks at Michelle Jones, she’s already looking right back at him like she’s been debating whether he was worth the glance up from the West African feminist novels she’s been reading lately -- yes, he googled one or two of the titles he saw her carrying, and no, he will not be sharing that fact with anybody -- and she’s leaning towards a no.  
  
Now, though, her eyes are on the cards. There’s a tiny furrow between her eyebrows and the curls that managed to escape her ponytail are falling across her forehead, but she doesn’t seem all that bothered by them. (Okay, well, she tries exactly once to blow them out of her face and rolls her eyes when it doesn’t work, like she’s holding her hair personally responsible for disappointing her. It makes him smile.)

It occurs to him that he’s been staring at her hair for an unquestionably weird amount of time, so he looks down at the cards in her hands just as she makes the buzzer noise again. That’s when he realizes that she’s writing something with a pen as she does it, the cards shifted to one hand and the team’s attention shifted to the freshman who named the wrong element. Then he blinks and she’s onto the next question, the pen gone and the deck of cards held in both of her hands.

The team gets the next question right, but the one after that is wrong and there it is again: MJ makes that buzzer noise and while everyone’s distracted and laughing over it, she picks up the pen again and makes a quick mark before picking up the deck again.  Peter’s willing to bet that she’s tracking the wrong answers that they get in each subject, but she’s writing too quickly to be taking actual notes, so she must be making marks on a chart.

He watches for a few more questions and realizes that she’s tallying by subject and by person, and there’s no way that they already had a resource like that on hand, which means that MJ _made her own charts_ just for decathlon practice.

She really cares about this, Peter realizes. She doesn’t approach it the way that Liz did, but there’s no question that she takes her responsibility to the team more seriously than most people expect her to take anything. (Granted, that’s because ‘most people’ are idiots, he thinks, with a venom that surprises him.)

He feels as if he’s discovered something she didn’t want him to, and knowing it feels too big somehow, like a balloon in his chest that might carry him away with it. He finally makes himself look away from her and answers her next four questions in a row, as rapid-fire as she throws them out. He fumbles the last one, though, and this time when she makes the buzzer noise, her mouth quirks up into that half-smile and he thinks, _oh no._

* * *

Peter’s useless for the entire rest of the day, too busy quietly freaking out to do or say much in class. When did this even happen to him? How long has MJ’s smile made his heart do that weird flipping thing? How did he not notice that that was happening?

He sees her now almost as often as he sees Ned, and somehow he missed the fact that all she needs to do is grin at him and he simultaneously feels like he could fly and also like he might maybe throw up. She’s spent whole afternoons at the apartment, three feet away from him on the couch, and he’s only now realizing that his nerves may not have just been about her discovering that he’s Spider-Man and ending their friendship over all the lying he’s done in the past almost-year. You would think that a person who can mentally run quadratic functions while swinging across the New York City skyline would be a little quicker on the uptake.

It’s not just that he didn’t realize it, either. He’s a little annoyed at himself for letting it happen in the first place, like there aren’t a hundred other people who it’d be more convenient to develop crushes on than MJ. And it’s not that he can’t see why it happened, because of course he can. She’s beautiful and she’s smarter than him by miles and people make the mistake of thinking that she’s apathetic, but there are things that she cares about enough to be willing to lay down her life for them. She’s incredible, and that’s the problem. He doesn’t just _like-like_ her, he actually likes her.

He’s not completely clear on whether she became friends with him and Ned by accident or coincidence or just by proximity, but he enjoys having her around. He likes hearing her and Ned provide a running mocking commentary when they watch terrible movies on Netflix and he likes that she joins him whenever he gets detention for cutting class. Lunch doesn’t even feel complete anymore without MJ there to make fun of him and Ned from behind her book. There’s no question that Ned is his best friend, but MJ is just as important to him.

She’s too good a friend to lose over the fact that he’s developed a ridiculous crush on her, and Peter resolves then and there -- 1:17 PM, the Spanish classroom -- that he’s going to keep his mouth shut about this.

No one else needs to know.

* * *

“So is it the MJ thing or what?” Ned asks, and Peter spins around so fast in the desk chair that he falls out of it.

He stares up at his best friend from the floor, hoping he can blame his look of alarm on his fall and not on the question. “What?” he asks, and it’s slightly too high, so he does his best to pitch it lower and sound more normal. “I mean, what? There’s no MJ thing. What MJ thing? Why- why do you ask?”

Ned shrugs, seemingly unfazed by Peter’s scrambling. “You keep asking me what I got for 8 on the trig homework and I keep telling you that we only had to do the first four and then you nod and ask me again five minutes later. Usually it’d be Spider-Man stuff that has you this distracted, but since I’m your guy in the chair and you haven’t told me anything about it, I just figure it’s the MJ thing.”

“Ned, what MJ thing?” Peter’s not on the floor anymore, but he’s chosen to stand up and just lean against his desk in case Ned’s answer throws him off again.

“You know, the thing where you like her but you’re not saying anything because you don’t want to ruin your friendship when she rejects you?”

“What.”

“Come on, Peter, it’s not like you’re the best at keeping these things secret. I’ve known since March.”

Peter tamps down the instinct to ask why no one told _him_ about it if it was so obvious, because even in his head that sounds like the kind of thing that’s too pathetic to say, even if it’s just in front of your best friend. He groans, covering his face with his hands. “I can’t believe this.”

“If it helps, May knows, too.”

He raises his head to look at Ned, eyes wide. “ _May knows?_ ”

The response comes not from inside his room, but the kitchen where May is making dinner. “I’ve known since April,” she calls out, and Peter wonders if it wouldn’t be too much trouble for the universe to just strike him dead where he stands.

He closes his eyes, trying to decide whether repeatedly banging his head against the wall would do anything for the situation other than adding dramatic flair. “This is great,” he says. “Just great.”

“Um, if it helps-” Ned starts to say, but Peter cuts him off.

“It probably won’t.”

“If it helps,” Ned says again, a little more forcefully, “I don’t think MJ knows.”

So maybe he won’t make a dent in the wall with his head just yet. “Are you- are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. I think she’s more interested in figuring out where you keep disappearing to, because she stopped believing the Stark internship story months ago.”

Peter sighs. “Does anybody still believe the Stark internship story?”

Ned thinks for a moment, breaking out his best guy-in-the-chair face while he mentally runs through a list of all the people they have to regularly lie to. “Mr. Harrington!” he finally says. “Mr. Harrington still believes it.”

“It’s nice to know that at least one teacher doesn’t think I’m a pathological liar.”

“You know, Mr. Harrington might know the other thing, too, actually,” Ned muses.

“How?!” Peter croaks. “How do all these people know?”

But Ned is laughing at him now, shaking his head. “I’m just saying, you miss practice a lot less now that MJ is team captain.”

“Yeah, but that’s because she asked me to be there.”

Ned just looks back at him for a moment, waiting for it to sink in.

When it finally does, Peter grimaces and brings up a hand to cover his eyes. “That’s why all these people know, isn’t it?”

At least Ned is kind enough to just nod yes in silence.

* * *

He never realized how low-maintenance his crush on Liz was. Ninety-five percent of the time, it was just admiration from a distance, and the awkward babbling that filled the last five percent was basically Peter’s second language, so he never had to think that hard about it.

With MJ, though? With MJ, there’s constant conversation and it feels like a minefield. He’s been trying for the past two weeks to act like nothing has changed, but it’s harder than it sounds. He’s the more talkative person, so when there’s silence between the two of them that needs filling, it's his job to do it. Peter tries to keep it light -- I’m about to fail this math test, we were definitely not that small when we were freshmen, how's your collection of Coach Wilson sketches coming? -- but sometimes it’s like he likes her so much that he kind of forgets how to be a person.

It’s not even the awkward and fumbling sentences that are his problem. MJ is used to those by now. It’s the times when he says the right thing that are the worst, like a well-timed joke that startles a laugh out of her. She gets this look of surprise and delight on her face, and every time it happens it has the unfortunate side effect of making him want to sit her down and tell her everything on the spot. Like, everything-everything, because he knows that she deserves to know.

They’re walking to chemistry together, and because Peter has what May calls self-sabotaging tendencies, he makes the choice to bring up Spider-Man. In theory, it seems like a good way to fill the air: MJ always has plenty to say about vigilante justice and government corruption and the uselessness of the Sokovia Accords.

In practice, though, because it’s MJ, she immediately throws him for a loop. “So, have you, like...seen him lately?” she asks. “You know, at the Stark internship?”

Peter swallows. “I- uh, not really. Just, uh, just once, like in passing, you know?”

She hums and shrugs a shoulder. “Well, next time you do see him, you should get his number. Maybe you won't walk into as many doors if you have a superhero watching your back,” she says. “I mean, you walk into a lot of doors, so I don't know how much a difference it’ll make, like, facewise. But still.”

“So you're saying I should have a superhero bodyguard.”

“No, I'm saying you should have a superhero on speed dial for the next time you try to headbutt a door open, because he’s strong enough to save you the trouble. And anyway,” MJ says, “wouldn't it be cool to have a personal superhero? You could call them anytime, day or night, and they’d just be there.”

He’s actively trying to keep his mouth shut at this point, because he’s pretty sure that if he talks he’s going to wind up saying something stupid like, ‘You already have one.’ His silence is on the verge of stretching on a second too long when someone appears beside them and Peter is, for once in his life, grateful to see Flash Thompson.

It lasts about half a second.

“What are you two losers doing, setting up a booty call? You know those aren't, like, scheduled in advance, right?”

Without sparing him so much as a glance, MJ just keeps walking as she says, “Go fuck yourself, Flash.” Then she turns back to Peter like they were never interrupted and says, “Personal superhero. Consider it, loser. Then I could be less worried about you getting a concussion immediately before Decathlon finals.”

They turn into the chemistry classroom, and as they walk to their assigned seats, there’s a warmth spreading in Peter’s chest that has nothing to do with the heat outside.

* * *

They’re ten minutes into a stoichiometry quiz when Peter first smells the smoke.

His first instinct is that it must be someone smoking just outside the window, unbothered to move out of the shade in the ninety degree weather, but the smell only gets stronger and he realizes that it’s harsher than cigarette smoke, more chemical and acrid.

He looks around the room, but everyone is busy working on their quizzes, and they’d all be able to smell it if the gas was leaking on one of the Bunsen burners. It has to be coming from the lab next door, and as Peter looks towards the front of the room, he sees the first wisps of smoke coming through the air vent.

“Uh, Mr. Hudson?” he says.

The teacher sets down his papers with a sigh and looks his way. “What is it, Parker?”

Peter points at the vent. “I’m pretty sure the school is on fire.”

Everything seems to pass in a blur after that, from Mr. Hudson pulling the fire alarm (if Peter had the time, he’d be a little concerned that a roomful of smoke wasn’t enough to set it off) to everyone scrambling to get out of the classroom. Peter is one of the first out the door, but that’s only so he can suck in a breath and go into the lab next door, where someone is lying on the floor, surrounded by smoke.

He drops to the ground as he pushes into the room because he’ll be useless if he passes out, and as he moves forward he sees that whatever this person was messing with, it’s still sitting on the burner, steadily turning black and kicking up more fumes.

He dives for the cabinet under the closest lab table and grabs a ruler, which he uses to knock the flask off the burner before reaching up to turn off the gas. His eyes burn, but he twists the valve until he feels resistance and drops back down to the ground. It occurs to Peter that he doesn’t know how spiders do in fires, but he imagines that the answer is ‘not well’.

When he turns back to the kid on the ground, he’s still breathing, which is all that Peter needs to know. He grabs him under the arms and pulls him to the door, scrambling for the handle until they finally tumble out into the hallway.

The fall and the clearer air seem to wake the kid up, and as he blearily asks what happened, Peter just tells him that there’s a fire and they need to go now. He hauls the guy to his feet and together they make it down the stairs and out the door right behind the administrators, who all swarm the kid, first to check if he’s okay and then to ask what happened. Peter uses their distraction as a cover to get away, pretending not to hear Ms. Warren as she asks him if he’s alright.

He sees Ned out in the parking lot, but trying to jog over makes him cough a lot, so he walks as fast as he can while focusing on breathing normally. The burning in his lungs has mostly subsided by the time he gets there, and before Peter knows it, he’s being engulfed in a hug.

“I’m really glad you’re not dead, Peter.”

He lets out a weak laugh, clapping Ned on the shoulder as they separate. “Me, too.”

But Ned doesn’t laugh with him, his eyes still scanning the outside of the school. He’s looking for someone, Peter realizes, and when he glances down at the rest of the students gathered outside, he notices that Abe and Flash are doing the same thing.

It’s like his subconscious knows before he does: he whirls around to where his chemistry class is standing, looking over the group once, twice, three times and feeling his heart sink lower with each pass.

She’s not with them. The class is there, but MJ’s not with them.

He doesn’t remember telling his feet to move, but he’s already walking back towards the school when Ned catches him by the arm and stops him. “Peter, you can’t go in there.”

“I’m the only one who can go in there,” Peter hisses, pulling his arm out of Ned’s grip. “I have to help.”

“You barely made it out the first time!” Ned says. “And how are you even going to help her? Midtown is huge and MJ is smarter than both of us. You know she found a way out, Peter. You just have to wait.”

“Ned, what if she-” he starts to ask, but Ned just shakes his head.

“She’s fine, Peter. She’s going to be fine, and you know that when we see her the first thing she’s going to do is punch you for thinking she needed to be rescued.”

If it were anyone other than Ned trying to make him feel better, Peter would already be inside the building. He’s hardwired to trust Ned, though, so he just focuses on the confidence in his best friend’s voice and keeps his eyes on the school.

The minutes stretch so long that Peter’s almost sure there’s some kind of alien tech messing with the space-time continuum. It feels like a full hour has gone by before Flash’s voice sounds over the sirens from the approaching fire trucks. “Look!” he calls, pointing towards the eastern side of the school. “Look, they’re over there!”

It is the second and probably final time in Peter’s life that he’s grateful for Flash Thompson.

Coming around the far corner of the school are two people: MJ, with a pair of crutches tucked under her free arm, and Faiza from their chemistry class, with her arm around MJ’s shoulders as she hobbles towards the parking lot.

This time, when Peter makes a run for it, Ned is right behind him.

* * *

The girls finally finish their combination limping-hopping marathon at a tree by the football field, breathing heavy but both still in one piece.

“Are you guys okay?” Peter asks as he reaches them, before dissolving into a minor coughing fit. Sprinting, he thinks, may not have been the best choice at this particular moment.

“Yeah,” MJ rasps. “Yeah, we’re fine.”

“Only because Michelle just saved my life,” Faiza adds, taking her crutches back as MJ sits down on the grass with a wince. “Your girlfriend’s basically a superhero, Peter.”

“I know,” he says without thinking, then panics. “I mean, she’s not my- but like, I know what you were trying to-”

“Faiza, do you want some help getting down to the parking lot?” Ned asks, cutting Peter off. “There’s probably somewhere you can sit down for a while. I bet Ms. Warren will force Flash to open up his car if we ask.” The girl in question nods, and as Ned proffers his arm to her, he turns back to look at MJ. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

MJ coughs again, nodding at him. “Thanks, Leeds. You, too.”

Peter watches Ned and Faiza walk away, then turns to MJ, who’s resting her head against the tree trunk. “Are you sure you’re fine? Because we- I mean, we can probably talk our way into Flash’s car, too, if we ask. You did just save someone’s life.”

She shakes her head. “Too crowded. I just need air.” She breathes in deep, then exhales slowly. “And I didn’t save anyone’s life.”

“The bleachers, then,” Peter says. “No people and real seats. Plus they’re literally right here, and I don’t think I can walk back there without passing out.”

She squints up at him from where she’s sitting in the dirt, and they both know she doesn’t believe him, but she nods anyway. “Okay,” she says, and for once she doesn’t bat away the hand Peter holds out to help her up.

She still hasn’t let go of his hand by the time they reach the bleachers, so he just sits down next to her instead of in the row below.

They’re silent for a while. She lets go of his hand at one point, and it feels a little like a loss, but he’s mostly just focused on MJ’s breathing, listening hard for the rattling sound that might mean she inhaled too much smoke. He doesn’t hear it, though, and eventually her breathing slows and the coughing fades.

She lets out a little sigh, letting out her hair and dragging a hand through it, and it finally catches him in the chest how close a call it was for both of them today. There wasn’t anything sinister about this: there were no supervillains dangling her over a city or strapping her to explosives. It had nothing to do with the way that being Spider-Man endangered the people he loved, but he could’ve lost her anyway.

He could have lost her anyway, and it would have been without telling her anything, and _he can’t do this anymore._

“Hey, MJ?”

“Yeah?”

He looks straight ahead at the football field, carefully keeping his voice even. “I’m Spider-Man.”

MJ just nods, staring at the field, too. “I know.”

Any other time, this news would be a shock, but after the day that he’s had, Peter just looks over at her and laughs, wry and tired and only a little surprised. “Of course you do. Of course you know.”

“It’s why you went into the lab to save that kid, isn’t it?” she asks, and he doesn’t know if he’s imagined the tremor in her voice. “You’ve made it your job to protect us.”

“Just call me your personal superhero,” he laughs, gently nudging her.

She nudges him back. “I guess I can do that, but only while I wait for that Black Panther guy to return my phone calls.”

“I don’t blame you. That guy’s a badass.”

MJ laughs then, that clear, delighted laugh that makes his heart do the flipping thing and his mouth want to spill all of his secrets to her, and for once instead of making him nervous, it just makes him braver.

“Hey, MJ?” he says again.

“Hmm?”

“Do you want to go out with me sometime?”

She whips around to stare at him, her eyes wide. “What?”

Peter swallows the urge to abandon ship and pushes through. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, so if I do just, you know, throw a hand over my mouth or punch me or something, but I- I really, really like you. As more than a friend. I don’t know why I added that. You already know that I like you as a friend, obviously, so I don’t-”

She cuts him off by saying his name and he’d be worried, except there’s no heat behind it. No panic, no irritation, no impatience. It’s softer than she usually says it, and she’s looking at him with this light in her eyes that he hopes he never forgets. “Peter,” she says again, a grin playing at the corners of her mouth, “shut up.”

He does.

“I’m-” she breaks off, taking a deep breath and closing her eyes for a moment, and he finally sees it: she’s nervous, too. “I’m going to kiss you now, if that’s okay.”

Peter doesn’t think he has ever agreed to anything faster. “Yeah, yes, absolutely. That’s okay.”

MJ takes another deep breath and slides a little closer to him on the bleachers. “Good answer,” she says with a grin.

And there’s nothing about it that isn’t hesitant -- the way MJ braces a hand against his neck, the way they both lean in a little too slow, the way Peter’s hands flail around for a second when she actually presses her lips to his -- but it’s with MJ, so Peter has trouble finding it anything but perfect.

He can’t stop the dopey grin that spreads across his face when they pull apart, and it only gets bigger when MJ smiles back at him and slips her free hand into his. He pulls her back in for a second kiss then, and a third one, and he thinks that maybe this is the feeling that he’s chasing every time he webslings from skyscraper to skyscraper at night.

“So,” she says, resting her forehead against his. “About that date-”

But she’s cut off by a girl’s voice -- it might be Faiza, actually -- calling out, “Yeah, Michelle! Get it, girl!”

Peter throws his head back and laughs, but MJ’s jaw actually drops a little in mortification, and he’s close enough to see a blush creeping up her face, too. “Never mind,” she tells him, “this was a terrible idea and I hate you.”

“Are you sure about that?” he asks, doing his best to bite back his grin.

The corners of her mouth turn down, the way that they always do when she’s fighting a smile. She wrinkles her nose at him, possibly to indicate that she’s not pleased, but it backfires because he just thinks it’s cute and kisses her again. This time, her smile is too big to hide, so she just buries her face in his shoulder and mumbles, “Shut up, Parker. You’re the worst.”

(She still doesn’t let go of his hand, though.)

 

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly, we cannot have gotten more than twenty minutes of MJ in that movie and I was already prepared to lay down my life for her so you just try and tell me Peter does not feel the same way.
> 
> Anyway I've sold my soul to these two now, so there will unquestionably be more where this came from. In the meantime, thanks for reading and let me know what you thought!


End file.
